The great Polish Marxist and revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was born 150 years ago today. In honor of her life and legacy, I thought I’d post some of her works and texts about her along with an introduction to her 1918 polemic The Russian Revolution by Onorato Damen.

Luxemburg was a heroic, larger than life figure, a champion of the working class dedicated to the overthrow of the capitalist order. From a young age, she became steeped in the discourse of Marxism and involved herself in socialist causes. Along with Leo Jogiches, she founded the Social Democratic Party of Poland and Lithuania. When the “revisionist controversy” broke out in the late 1890s, Luxemburg penned what was easily the best response to Eduard Bernstein’s reformism, Reform or Revolution?.

During the next couple decades, Luxemburg became professionally trained in economics and contributed to a number of theoretical debates within international Marxism. Becoming more involved in the German Social-Democratic Party, she initially sided with orthodoxy but by 1910 found herself at odds with its main spokesman, Karl Kautsky. Thereafter she increasingly locked horns with the party’s leadership, until in August 1914 the outbreak of world war led to a world-historic crisis.

Unlike many of her prominent comrades, Luxemburg was unequivocally opposed to the war and took a stand publicly against it. For this she was jailed for several years, as was the firebrand Karl Liebknecht, who would soon become one of her closest cothinkers in opposition to bourgeois militarism. After the November Revolution of 1918, the two were freed and immediately threw themselves into the struggle, agitating for proletarian revolution. Tragically, they were murdered by the Freikorps under orders from the Social-Democratic government.

Of course, Luxemburg was not perfect. She and Liebknecht should have split from the Second and Second-and-a-Half Internationals sooner, and her critique of Marx’s “reproduction schemas” in Volume 2 of Capital was based on mistaken premises. Her theory of periodic crisis was underconsumptionist, moreover. Other Marxist theorists, such as Henryk Grossman, took Luxemburg to task on this score. Nevertheless, she remained an “eagle,” as Lenin put it in a rejoinder to Paul Levi:

We shall reply to [Levi] by quoting two lines from a good old Russian fable: “Eagles may at times fly lower than hens, but hens can never rise to the height of eagles.” Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland [I would argue she was right here]; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of the accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others, she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (she corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 after she was released). But in spite of her mistakes she was — and remains for us — an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works (the publication of which the German Communists are inordinately delaying, which can only be partly excused by the tremendous losses they are suffering in their severe struggle) will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of Communists all over the world. “Since August 4, 1914, German Social-Democracy has been a stinking corpse” — this statement will make Rosa Luxemburg’s name famous in the history of the international working class movement. And, of course, in the backyard of the working-class movement, among the dung heaps, hens like Paul Levi, Scheidemann, Kautsky and all that fraternity will cackle over the mistakes committed by the great Communist. To every man his own.

You can download a number of works by or about Luxemburg below. I wouldn’t recommend all of these books, especially the secondary literature, but there’s useful stuff to be found in many of these selections. Also, be sure to check out the ICT’s article on “Rosa Luxemburg and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement in Poland.”

Works by Luxemburg

1. Selected Writings
2. Complete Works, Volume 1: Economic Writings 1
3. Complete Works, Volume 2: Economic Writings 2
4. Complete Works, Volume 3: Political Writings 1, On Revolution (1897-1905)
5. The Accumulation of Capital (1913)
6. “May Day” (1913)
7. The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism (1918, 1903) [highly misleading title added by the translator]
8. “My Idea of Bolshevism” (1918)

Letters of Luxemburg

1. Letters (1891-1919)
2. Selected Letters
3. Comrade and Lover: Letters to Leo Jogiches

Biographies of Luxemburg

1. Paul Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work (1928)
2. J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 1: 1895-1911 (1962)
3. J.P. Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Volume 2: 1911-1919 (1962)
4. Paul Mattick Sr., “Review of Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettl” (1967)
5. Klaus Gietinger, The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg (2008)

Works about Luxemburg’s theory and practice

1. Tadeusz Kowalik, Rosa Luxemburg: Theory of Accumulation and Imperialism (1971)
2. Raya Dunayevskaya, Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution (1981)
3. Hillel Ticktin, “Rosa Luxemburg’s Concept of Crisis in a Contemporary Theoretical Context” (2012)
4. Daniel Gaido and Manuel Quiroga,  “The Early Reception of Rosa Luxemburg’s Theory of Imperialism” (2013)
5. Jason Schulman (ed.), Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Legacy (2013)
6. Jan Toporowski, Ewa Karwowski, Riccardo Bellofiore (eds.), The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange, and Michal Kalecki: Volume 1 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (2014)
7. Jan Toporowski, Ewa Karwowski, Riccardo Bellofiore (eds.), The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, Oskar Lange, and Michal Kalecki: Volume 2 of Essays in Honour of Tadeusz Kowalik (2014)
8. Engin Delice, “The Dialectic Whole Between Theory and Reality in Rosa Luxemburg” (2015)
9. Jon Nixon, Rosa Luxemburg and the Struggle for Democratic Renewal (2018)
10. Ankica Čakardić, Like a Clap of Thunder: Three Essays on Rosa Luxemburg (2019)

Novels about Luxemburg

1. Alfred Döblin, Karl and Rosa: November 1918, A German Revolution (1950)

Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution

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It is fashionable these days to quote Luxemburg’s ideas and positions, especially in her polemics with Lenin. However this return to theoretical and critical Luxemburgism has mainly been carried out by those who have learned nothing from her real thinking or her heroic militancy. They reinterpret her formulations on freedom and democracy in their own way, and mostly for devious motives, whilst for Luxemburg these expressions serve only as a catalyst for the growth of revolutionary consciousness in the masses as they struggle for emancipation. However, on the lips of some enlightened bourgeois and renegade socialists such ideas are useful for dragging the proletariat into the capitalist mindset and the political and economic structures of the ruling class.

The attempt to use Luxemburg’s polemics as a front for the most decrepit and dishonest anti-communism stemming from the Second International and the Two and a Half International, does not deserve special attention. On the other hand, having another look at this same material, a product of the polemics with Lenin, and of the key problems of the party and of the dictatorship of the proletariat as presented and confirmed in the Russian experience, is very timely and fruitful.

At the root of her disagreement with Lenin were the same ideas that are reemerging today in the politics of the vanguard of the international labour movement, except that today they are sharper and more dramatic given the defeat of that burning test of socialism which was the Soviet experience. Continue reading →